A deep i-selected multiwaveband galaxy catalogue in the COSMOS field

In this paper we present a deep and homogeneous i-band-selected multiwaveband catalogue in the COSMOS field covering an area of about 0.7 deg2. Our catalogue with a formal 50 per cent completeness limit for point sources of i∼ 26.7 comprises about 290 000 galaxies with information in 8 passbands. We combine publicly available u, B, V, r, i, z and K data with proprietary imaging in H band. We discuss in detail the observations, the data reduction, and the photometric properties of the H-band data. We estimate photometric redshifts for all the galaxies in the catalogue. A comparison with 162 spectroscopic redshifts in the redshift range 0 ≲z≲ 3 shows that the achieved accuracy of the photometric redshifts is Δz/(zspec+ 1) ≲ 0.035 with only ∼2 per cent outliers. We derive absolute UV magnitudes and investigate the evolution of the luminosity function evaluated in the rest-frame UV (1500 Å). There is a good agreement between the luminosity functions derived here and the luminosity functions derived in the FORS Deep Field. We see a similar brightening of M* and a decrease of φ* with redshift. The catalogue including the photometric redshift information is made publicly available.